


Fairytale Ending

by Unsentimentalf



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: Gen, Post-Gauda Prime
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-11
Updated: 2017-10-11
Packaged: 2019-01-16 01:46:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12333003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unsentimentalf/pseuds/Unsentimentalf
Summary: “You kept me alive for a reason, I suppose.  I’m guessing it wasn’t to tell me fairy stories.”“I didn’t keep you alive,” she said. “By the time my ship got here you were, all of you, quite dead.  Fortunately for you I had a small quantity of a substance called revival juice.  Under fairly restrictive circumstances it can be used to revive the newly dead. I had two doses. I have one left.”For the B7Friday prompt "Revival"





	Fairytale Ending

Avon stood up from the dead body. Like the others there was no doubt about the matter; it had been long enough for rigor mortis had set in. There had been a time during much of his life when he had never seen an actual corpse. Now it seemed that there was no-one left alive. Just him and her and the guards that would stop him killing her. 

Servalan smiled, sweeping her black fur around the blacker satin in the the mockery of mourning. “Which one would you like back?” She seemed positively gleeful. Hardly surprising in the circumstances. 

“What do you want from me, Servalan?” He’d thought that he was going to die. He’d swear that he’d seen the fingers move on the triggers, but he’d woken on the floor with not a bruise or graze and Servalan looking down on him, inviting him to check the bodies of the others, to confirm that he was the sole one left.

“A choice,” she said. “I can resurrect one of your companions. I just need you to tell me which one.” 

He presumed that she intended to be cruel. How a bad joke was possibly meant to make things worse for him he didn’t know. The pettiness annoyed him. “There’s Blake.” he wanted to scream at her. “Dead. I killed him.There’s Soolin. Dead There’s Vila. Dead. I don’t care what your game is. Leave me alone.” Instead he just kept silent.

“You don’t believe me,” she said. “You ought to. You were as dead as they were two hours ago, before I brought you back to life. Don’t you remember?”

He remembered imagining the trigger fingers moving. Nothing else. He must have been hit from the back by a well aimed stun, then kept unconscious for some hours with drugs. 

“You kept me alive for a reason, I suppose. I’m guessing it wasn’t to tell me fairy stories.” 

“I didn’t keep you alive,” she said. “By the time my ship got here you were, all of you, quite dead. Fortunately for you I had a small quantity of a substance called revival juice. Under fairly restrictive circumstances it can be used to revive the newly dead. I had two doses. I have one left.”

Avon shook his head, scornful. “One, that’s scientifically impossible. Two, if you did have such stuff you wouldn’t waste it on someone you’d be just as glad to see dead anyway. Three, if you did have another dose, you’d have no reason to use it at my discretion rather than your own. This is not a fairy tale, Servalan. You are not a genie granting wishes. You wanted everyone dead,. Now they are dead and they are going to stay that way. Either shoot me or torture me or do whatever else you have in mind. You can’t do anything that matters to any of them any more.”

“If I can’t do what I claim, what harm will it do to pick one of them anyway?” she argued. “Suppose that your rather closed mind managed to conceive the idea, for a fraction of a second, of resurrection. Which one, Avon? Put right your brutal murder of Blake? Save your old comrade Vila? Give Dayna another chance- poor Dayna, dying so young?” 

She held up a small test tube. For the first time he saw that her hand was gloved in a metal gauntlet. “Give me one name, Avon, for this and I’ll let you say goodbye to the rest of them for a little while in peace. Not long, I’m afraid - we have much to do together - but a little.” 

“Go to hell,” Avon said and he went for the object in her hand. Pain exploded in his hip from a gun bolt as he grabbed the test tube and smashed it as hard as he could against the table. It broke, the liquid burning terribly cold against his fingers as he rolled off the table and on his back, curled up in agony.

“It hasn’t worked. Take him away!” Servalan’s voice was as cold as the liquid.

 

Avon considered the frozen shot of Servalan’s face in the final frame of the video clip. She looked unsettlingly furious. 

His right hand was stinging as it so often did. He rubbed it with his other hand, not bothering to glance down at the bleached white skin. The vial had contained some kind of acid. Apparently Servalan had planned to disfigure the corpse that he selected, in a macabre demonstration of spite. 

If he’d figured that out he’d have held his temper and let her do it. Blake was past caring and it could have saved Avon fifteen years of discomfort. 

It had taken a couple of months before he’d recovered enough from the burns and his shattered hip bone to be shoved in a detention cell and forgotten about until the revolution finally caught up with him. The rebels had made use of his reputation and his abilities and in return he’d made use of them. Election to high office had given him real power in the newfound democracy. 

After that he’d been rather busy and it was only now, some years later, that he’d got round to digging up the old Federation security tapes. His doctor had suggested that more information about the nature of the acid might help with the problems they’d been having with the new skin grafts. Avon didn’t really expect much improvement after all these years but he’d agreed to see what he could find. So far that was, as expected, nothing. It was hardly likely that Servalan would have left records of the particular acid she’d intended to use. 

“Show tags,” he said to the viewer for the sake of completeness. Along the left hand margin of the screen a list appeared;

Gauda Prime  
Servalan  
Kerr Avon  
Interrogation  
Revival juice  


He snorted at the last item. Fairy tales. So much for hoping that the scientific formula might have been recorded. “Give me the index for tag ‘revival juice’” He’d expected to draw a blank apart from this one usage and was rather startled to see the short list running part of the way down the screen. ****

Revival juice, discovery, Gethsemane  
Revival juice, discovery, Federation Vessel Marksman  
Revival juice, claimed properties, Gethsemane, Federation Vessel Marksman  
Revival juice, known usage, Gauda Prime, Servalan, Kerr Avon  
Revival juice, destruction, Gauda Prime, Servalan, Kerr Avon  


He suddenly realised that the archivist was hovering in front of him, politely and wisely staying out of eavesdropping distance. “I can get any more records that you need, Sir.” 

Avon shook his head. “It’s all ancient history, nothing important.” He blanked the screen and stood up. It had simply been acid, however imaginatively it had been tagged. His scarred fingers were evidence enough of that. Acid and a stun shot to the back of his head and the trigger fingers moving only in his imagination, and Servalan was long beyond interrogation and Roj Blake was dead by his hand just as he had been for the last fifteen years. 

“Copy to my recorder then erase all records tagged ‘Revival juice’, or 'Gethsemane',” he commanded. 

“Authorisation for class 2 record deletion required,” the computer stated. 

The archivist looked worried. “Sir, “ he said. “Class 2 records are considered to be of high significance.”

“I suggest that do your job and trust me to know mine." Avon said. “And I also suggest that you forget everything about my visit here unless you want to spend the next ten years on a prison planet.”

“Yes sir,” the man said humbly.

“Authorisation to delete class 2 records. Voice print Kerr Avon, Justice Minister.” 

“Authorisation confirmed. Records deleted.”

“Good.” Avon reached for his cane and pushed himself to his feet. Nothing useful on the acid but he’d got the images he needed. Roj Blake, Servalan, the revolution- it really might as well be ancient history. The world had moved on, thanks to him. Now there was somewhere else he needed to be and he wasn’t looking forward to it.

 

Avon sat silent for a moment, gathering his thoughts before he stood to proclaim sentence. It had been a scrupulously fair trial, naturally. The government that he ran under someone else’s name had no need to invent evidence when the laws against political dissent were clear and unambiguous. This trial had been high profile and his words would be broadcast across the Galaxy. He intended to make them stick.

Time. He got slowly to his feet, the eyes of everyone in the court on him. He looked down at the woman, silent at last. If she’d had any sense none of them would have had to be here. He consciously set the timbre of his voice to resonate and spoke. 

“In this court we have heard of your many previous offences, and how the lower courts tempered justice with mercy. We have also heard your vehement if intellectually confused defence of democracy.

“It is now time for you to listen to the State, whose power, capacity for fair judgement and good will towards its citizens are far greater than yours will ever be.

“You have quoted the words of my old comrade Roj Blake at me as if that might make a difference, as there were any of his words that haven’t been considered and refuted a thousand times. You have shared with this court your belief that Blake was a true martyr to democracy. In that, although in nothing else, you were right."

He paused, letting that sink in. Then he pulled a picture from his morning’s video clip onto the screen behind him. Blake, on his back on the floor, limbs asprawl, eyes half closed and very definitely dead.

Avon had had his true political awakening on Gauda Prime, in that very room, looking down on the bodies of everyone that had mattered, understanding for the first time that the only way to avoid the same political instability that had driven Blake to his death was to avoid political dissension. It was time to pass on that message.

“And Roj Blake wasn’t the only martyr.”

The other photos; Tarrant, Dayna, Soolin, Vila. No-one had dared shown those faces, alive or dead, on a public forum since the revolution had been overturned but he had no doubt that enough in the audience would still know them.

“These are the corpses of my friends. Everyone now listening to my words knew, in person or by reputation, some of the tens of thousands more who died in the revolution. They were each martyrs to democracy, yet what was it all really for? "

He made his voice a little warmer, a trick he'd got better at over the years. 

"Not better living standards- your Federation has given you those, just as we now have fair courts, honest administration, reform to the grade system and a ban on the suppressant drugs that wrecked so many lives. We have made an end to systematic cruelty, to aggressive wars, to corruption and to rulers that care noting for those they rule. All these things have been achieved under the solid, stable political system that makes up your Federation. Democracy cannot promise one single improvement to your lives that we are not already giving you in abundance. And we lost a man such as Roj Blake to this phantom? To the abstract idolisation of a meaningless vote?"

Sad but determined. 

"In the Federation we do not ban political dissent because we fear for our power. We ban it because of this." The image behind him changed back to a close up of Blake’s broken body. "Talk of democracy or of any alternative political system has nothing to offer us but civil war and the deaths of more of our own best people. We ask for absolute obedience on this one principle not because we want to suppress the thoughts and actions of the people of the Federation but because it is the necessary price for participation in a system that benefits every one of its members."

Time to focus on the woman in front of him, his voice lower. “And when we fail to get that obedience; when chances for reform and repentance are given time and time again, and time and time again they are cast aside, we finally, reluctantly, do what we must to preserve the peace. I speak for the State and the preservation of the State. The sentence is death. No appeal is permitted.”

She glared up at him. “Prison broke you, Kerr Avon,” she called out. “You were brave once. Now we all pay the price of your fear. Blake would utterly despise what you’ve become.” 

They’d edit that bit out for the broadcast. He took his seat again, making sure that none of his relief that it was over showed on his face, and watched her hustled away. 

 

"The natives of Gethsemane are unaggressive but the leaders, called Guardians, are stubborn and have made threats involving the destruction of their own population. Consideration has been given to encouraging an internal coup but the strength of belief in their death cult (see Ethnographer Report) makes this difficult." 

Avon flicked down to that report

"Interview on Gethsemane regarding the Guardians  
q How are the Guardians chosen?  
a By death  
q Please explain  
a When a strong, brave and wise person dies young, they are chosen to become a Guardian. Their mouth is anointed with suumass (Note; this roughly translates as ‘revival juice’) and the geas is set upon them. Then they return to this world as a Guardian.  
q How is this possible if they are dead?  
a Because of the suumass  
q How is this suumass acquired?  
a Only the Guardians know.  
q Could we see a sample?  
a It is much too dangerous to the living.  
q Could suumass turn my people into Guardians?  
(Pause.)  
a Not into our Guardians. Your people would need to construct their own geas. It is very important to get the words right.  
q Do the wrong words stop it working?  
a No. The wrong words make the wrong Guardian and a wrong Guardian is very dangerous. 

Note. Other interviews with the natives produced similar answers. It should be noted that this ethnographer has met two ‘Guardians’ and they appear to be in all respects ordinary human beings. Nevertheless the belief in this fiction of resurrection is strongly held. My recommendation is that a sample of this suumass should be obtained, by any means necessary and its lack of efficacy demonstrated to the natives before the current Guardians are arrested and executed."

Avon snorted. As if that was ever going to work. It did at least explain why Gethsemane was a radioactive slagheap, its occupants having rejected the Federation occupying power with extreme prejudice. 

The rest was routine. Failure on the part of the Federation occupancy force had been rewarded by the execution of those few who had survived. Servalan's Federation had been prone to such catastrophic and wasteful failures - no one knew that as well as Avon did, having been responsible for causing more of them that anyone except possibly Servalan herself. 

There was no record of any suumass being taken off the planet and no indication of how it could have reached Servalan. 

He sat back, still for a few minutes, thinking.

He could see only three real possibilities. One. Servalan had faked the whole thing. She certainly had the capacity but he couldn’t at the moment see a motive.

Two. The suumass was a fake but Servalan had believed in its claimed properties. She had intended to apply it to Blake’s dead body but for some reason of her own she had also wanted Avon to believe that he too had died and had been resurrected. 

Three. The suumass genuinely had the power to revive the dead. 

He missed Orac, which had its faults but had undoubtedly been unparalleled at analysis. Never mind. The first two possibilities didn’t matter. Servalan’s motives were a dozen years dead with her.

What was the evidence for the third? The look on her face? Those hissed words; ‘It hasn’t worked’? The memory despite all logic telling him otherwise of trigger fingers moving? Acid burns from fifteen years ago that still etched his skin like no kind of acid any doctors could identify? It was hardly extraordinary enough evidence for such an extraordinary claim. 

He closed the files. He had looked at everything that existed and found not enough to draw any conclusions. Time to drop the subject. There was enough else that he needed to get on with. 

That night Avon woke from a nightmare. He could remember nothing of it except Blake shouting at him over and over, ‘The wrong words make the wrong Guardian!’

He reached out for his cane and started slowly into the kitchen. He didn’t dream of any of his dead often, but the Gauda Prime tapes had he supposed been upsetting. 

He dialled a hot drink and sat down, waiting for the nightmare’s artificial terror to subside. The wrong words. If Servalan really had resurrected him what words would she have used? Loyalty to her, maybe. That clearly hadn’t worked. 

Loyalty to the Federation? That would have been ironic, he supposed. Servalan’s Federation had been a practical and ideological disaster in almost all respects. When he had adopted the name and the structural basis for his own administration it might have seemed to others that he was vindicating the old regime, but of course it had been no more than utility. Since his intention had been to establish a state that was considered politically unassailable it was useful to adopt the trappings of the old Federation to give it a sense of long endurance. 

In one sense it might be claimed that no-one had in practice been as loyal to the old Federation as him, but there were reasons for that. Five dead reasons. It was he supposed quite a coincidence that his awareness of what needed to be done politically should happen on the same day as Servalan’s imaginary geas and to the same end. 

Avon sipped the drink and thought about coincidences. When his staff came in in the morning he was still sitting there, chilled through and too stiff to move by himself. He was assisted into a warm bath. When he came out he cancelled his morning appointments and gave his staff a name whom he insisted should be called for immediately.

After Carnell had left, Avon went to stand by the window looking out at the justice ministry. That had been unsettling. He’d expected a definite answer and got only uncertainty. His killing of Blake, the massacre of his fellows, his captivity and the end of all his hopes; that much, Carnell had said, might shake the firmest of minds into a new configuration. His natural cynicism about the world might have solidified into political conviction. It was certainly not impossible.

It was also, the psychostrategist had said, not that likely. Not for Avon. If he had been assessing Avon’s actions at the time he would have looked first for some other influence at work. Since Avon had no intention of telling him what that influence might have been, there was nothing more useful that the man could contribute and Avon had sent him away.

Geas, the natives of Gethsemane had called it. A spell of compulsion. A belief he could not shake. Outside the Federation was uncertainty, violence and death. Inside it was stability and control. He still felt that he had done the right thing in overthrowing the young, weak democracy. He was certain that he would always feel that way. 

He said aloud “So the wrong words make the wrong Guardian. But what then?” 

If he did not trust himself, who could he trust? Not his fellow council members. He had selected them for reasons that had nothing to do with intelligence or reliability. Not his civil servants. 

Blake. He’d trusted Blake, up until the moment when the man had seemed to betray him. Blake was dead, but who would Blake have trusted? 

He’d have trusted the people. The stupid, careless, ignorant, selfish people. Avon sighed. That would undoubtedly be a disaster but what other choice did he have? Even merely suspecting this he could not carry on as he had been. 

 

“This is very comfortable.” 

The tone was disapproving. Avon looked up from the microscope. His rooms were roughly one third the size of a Dome standard single apartment. He wondered how much the woman would like living there.

“I work for the Government computing service for seventy hours a week. It buys me some small comforts, though not, unfortunately, the right to choose my own visitors. What do you want?”

“You don’t remember me, do you?”

He was about to say no when he did. “Ah. You’re the dissident I sentenced to death. I’m afraid you’ve had a wasted journey. I don’t do apologies.”

“I wouldn’t take an apology from you if you begged me,” the woman said with venom. “I want an answer. When you used the dead bodies of your friends as propaganda for your murderous regime, did you mean a word of it or was it all for show?”

“I don;’t do politics either,” Avon said.

“Give me an answer or I’ll kick up such a fuss in the media about all these little comforts of yours that you’ll be back to bread and water in a dripping cell!”

He considered her. It wasn’t easy to get permission to visit him. She might well have a great deal of influence. 

“Very well. Yes, I meant it.”

“And do you still mean it?”

“No.” 

It was a trivial enough lie. He declined to elaborate further on either of his replies and listened perforce to her lengthy peroration. The woman still deserved execution, he decided, and was rather sorry that his dramatic dissolution of the government had happened in time to save her. 

She was talking nonsense, too. The current democratic government whose virtues she was praising was in fact a mess: inefficient, near bankrupt, riven with divisions, shamelessly populist and beholden to any number of highly unsavoury vested interests. Now his government...

He caught himself. Politics could never be his concern, not even in his private thoughts. There were plenty of people out there who agreed with him, particularly in the military, people who looked back to the few years of his Federation as a golden age of order and stability. Only a couple of days ago yet another coded message had made it past his tight security to sound him out about his support for a coup. He couldn't deny that he felt tempted. The prospect of spending the rest of his life in these cramped rooms fiddling around with improving microchip efficiency when he could be running an empire - it often seemed too much to be borne, yet it had to be.

If this truly was his afterlife then it was an extraordinarily annoying one but at least it had decent food and drink. After the woman was gone he opened a bottle of wine, the price of which would have had her spluttering even more with indignation. He toasted the photo of Blake on his desk that caused so much highly inaccurate speculation among his guards and visitors. The wrong words make the wrong Guardian. Let them all screw up their society with dreams of an ill defined and illusory freedom. He was back to being an underpaid computer technician, nothing more. He drained the glass and poured himself another. 

 

THE END


End file.
